Text Mask

[Andrew.Mills]

I am having a problem with our printing company. We are big firm with too many projects to plot in house, so we send all of our plotting to an out of house plotting firm. I use Text Mask to cut out our text so it can be readable. After a project is complete and ready for plotting, I Vic the files (Vic is a plot file) and send them to the plotting company. They use the Vic file I sent them and turn it into a Tif file for them to plot it and put it on their web site for viewing. In the process of taking the Vic file and turning it into the Tif file the text mask ends up hiding some of our text and creating big blank boxes around our text. We are getting calls saying that our DWG's are wrong and unreadable. I am going to go to the plotting company next week and was wondering if anyone had any ideas. Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks,
Andrew

[mjfarrell]

Sounds like the print drivers are not current between that
plot application and ADT. Verify the drivers that you use when
producing that VIC file, and the drivers involved in converting it
into a TIFF file. Could be that you and the print house should
switch to DWF for a more seamless transfer.

[Andrew.Mills]

I talked with the print company and that is what I think that we are going to end up doing. Thanks for the advise.

[Andrew.Mills]

I tried to do a test run with dwf and text mask didn't show up on the dwg. I did a print preview and it showed up there but not when I opened the dwf in the dwf viewer. Let me know why?

[mjfarrell]

My mistake I thought that this problem with DWF had been fixed.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=2891471&linkID=2475323
I guess AutoDesk needs to update this document to include
your release number as well.

[Andrew.Mills]

I was reading this and I can't seem to understand how to set the paper size for a raster image. I need to create a 24x36 D size plot. What DPI should I use and what pixel config should I use? A bit confused? Can you help?

[mjfarrell]

The DPI setting should be as high as your outsourced plot device can handle
ballanced with the lowest resolution required to show the level of detail you want.
The higher the DPI the bigger the resultant file.
Select the JPG or PNG plot device, hit properties button, and add or modify
the page sizes. The tricky part here is converting inches to pixels.
So for 300 DPI page size would be 300(24x36)7200x10800
for 600 DPI page size would be 600((24x36)14400x21600

[Andrew.Mills]

Would I then plot at a 1:1 scale or a scale to fit? 1:1 is asking for pixel to drawing units. What would that be. I can come close but I want to make sure that my dwg is to scale. You have been great so far. Thanks a whole bunch for your help.

[mjfarrell]

One should always plot the layout tab at 1:1.
The conversion is 300 Pixels per Inch Dots=Pixels
or 600 Pixels per Inch.

[Andrew.Mills]

Thank you very much for your help. Have a great rest of the day/night.